GM’s faulty switch settlement vindicates ‘at-fault’ victims

Family members of victims resulting from problems with GM ignition switches sit alongside their loved ones photographs as General Motors CEO Mary Barra and Anton Valukas, head of GM's internal recall investigation, testify on the GM ignition switch recall during a US House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 18, 2014.

PHOTO: Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images

Embattled General Motors tries to buy back the public trust. But settlement could be 13 years too late

Originally published: July 7, 2014

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GM is set to pay out at least $1-million for each death attributed to their faulty switches. They’ve finally worked out a formula calculating how much each person, now dead as a result of a flawed part they were aware of and decided to hide, is worth. They will factor in potential earnings, spouses and dependents.

Of course they have to pay, and of course there is no good way to put a dollar amount on a dead person. But we do it every day; remember those insurance policies that used to be offered to school children, where they sorted out how much the loss of each body part was worth? Back then we giggled over how much our individual limbs were worth, blissfully not realizing that we’d never known anyone actually hurt enough to make a claim. I also found it odd that you were worth less if you just died. As I got older, I learned the costs involved of surviving a catastrophic injury, and finally understood.

GM has lots of people to make claims. There is the official count of 13, but they know it will go higher. As recall notices ramped up, investigators started a redo on old cases. GM was aware of a problem in 2001; they started recalls in February, 2014. The first attributable death happened in 2005, when a Maryland teen died in her Cobalt when the airbags failed to go off. Reuters News Agency ran an investigation of their own using crash statistics and came up with 74 questionable deaths, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) acknowledges they believe the official numbers will escalate.

General Motors CEO Mary Barra talks to the media after appearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill on June 18, 2014 in Washington, D.C. The committee is hearing testimony on GM’s internal recall investigation and how the company is changing to prevent another safety crisis similar to its deadly delay in recalling millions of defective cars.Mark Wilson, Getty Images

“Reuters searched the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a national database of crash information submitted by local law-enforcement agencies, for single-car frontal collisions where no front air bags deployed and the driver or front-seat passenger was killed.” This is admittedly swinging a broad net, but it quite aptly describes the circumstances of the fatal crashes in the official 13. They put the results against cars in the same segment, and found Saturn Ions fatally faltering at nearly six times the rate of the Toyota Corolla, and Cobalts at over four times.

The New York Times has done an excellent ongoing series about the faces behind the numbers. The affected cars were primarily smaller, entry-level vehicles. The kind that teens might buy, or that their parents might buy for them. Young families on limited budgets. It’s a devastating read, not so much for the fact that so many people died in such a violent way, but because they were blamed for their own demise. Stunned families were dismissed in the David vs. Goliath scenario, told their loved one was drunk or a terrible driver. After all, nobody sails off a highway and hits a tree unless they’ve done something to deserve it.

As late as February of this year, GM officially stated, “[a]ll of these crashes occurred off-road and at high speeds, where the probability of serious or fatal injuries was high regardless of airbag deployment,” which is sort of mind-boggling, if you think about it. The cars were “off-road” because the brakes and steering failed when the ignition switched itself off, not because drivers were trying to, well, go off-roading. It is this type of insult that has compounded the pain of surviving families.

This undated photo provided by the The Cooper Firm on behalf of the Melton family shows Brooke Melton, who was killed in a car crash while driving her Chevrolet Cobalt near Atlanta in March 2010. The Melton family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against General Motors. The family’s lawyers now want to reopen the case and show that GM fraudulently concealed a problem with the car’s ignition switch.Courtesy of the Melton family, AP Photo

The wording of the settlement offer package has been stripped of all judgment. Prove the crash involved one of the cars in question (there is a list of 10 vehicles in the document) and that the airbags failed to deploy. You only give up your right to sue if you accept a cheque. The million dollars is a starting point, and those severely injured will get more. GM is facing potentially billions in payouts; the cut-off date for crashes is December of this year, meaning they’re allowing future claims that might happen. The settlement itself is a plainly worded one-pager, an absolute unicorn in today’s legal world. They are using the transparency they’ve been accused of lacking all these years.

For nearly a decade, families have been living with this. Not just the loss of their loved one, but the judgment that somehow they did this to themselves, and in some cases, to somebody else. Inexperienced drivers, they said. Careless drivers, they said. Drunk drivers, they said. No seatbelt, they said.

We knew the part was faulty and decided it was too expensive to fix it, they didn’t say.

Big fat cheques will absolutely assist those living with catastrophic injuries. Big fat cheques will ease the burden for families left behind. But something tells me the admission that their loved one wasn’t responsible will be worth even more.

Can you buy back public trust? Money talks, but so does 13 years of silence.

This undated photo provided by The Cooper Firm shows Brooke Melton’s Chevrolet Cobalt after the crash in which she was killed. The Melton family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against General Motors. The family’s lawyers now want to reopen the case and show that GM fraudulently concealed a problem with the car’s ignition switch.The Cooper Firm, AP Photo